This week 28 years ago was the unheralded opening of one of my all-time favorite movies, “The Princess Bride.” My friends and I wore out a VHS tape with that movie over the summers of 1988 and 1989 and gems of dialogue from it still spring to mind regularly from those many re-watchings. Unfortunately, the quote I’m living this week is “to the pain…” Not quite in the context of this scene, though that’s worth watching again and again too, but I woke up Thursday with an ear ache that has periodically gotten bad enough to make my eyes water. Certainly, sleep, already a precious commodity, has almost entirely disappeared from my life as alternately either laying down or standing up changes the auricular pressure enough to make my jaw reflect the pain in my inner ear. And, of course, the long-delayed work on the water main had to start Friday morning right outside our bedroom window at SEVEN FREAKING THIRTY AM, when I had just managed to drift into somnombulance…

At least hubs has the tools at home to treat my problem so I don’t have to worry about compounding my issues with my notoriously bad reactions to western pain and other medications.

On the other hand, I got to help my niece celebrate her 12th birthday this week and finally got to treat a former colleague and his wife to a fancy dinner in thanks for his helpfulness in recent months. So there may be something to Alan Watts’ quote about being sensitized to both ends of the spectrum.

I’m just sick of not having enough energy or focus to be able to proceed with my edits and writing. Especially since I saw this week that Russia is re-opening the murder of Tsar Nicholas and his wife by exhuming their bones. I want to get back to Anne and Ivan and their adventures. But I feel like right now my writing may be more along the lines of what these 20 PhD students wrote to summarize their thesis papers… I don’t want anyone to think “I can’t believe she thought this was good enough to publish.”

So for tonight, in spite of the heavy cloud cover in the DC area, I’m watching the super-moon lunar eclipse via the wonder of the Internet… with a little help from Gayla’s hubs’ live stream. I’ll grant myself this week off and cross my fingers that all the stuff hubs is doing to treat my symptoms makes me heal enough to think goals and writing next week.